“Why give up that much equity for an amount we could raise other ways?:” SMB Tech Talk from ArtJamz

This week I’ll be running a series of Five Question interviews with small businesses which were facilitated by BondStreet, a SMB lending platform (we’re investors). LocalBiz stories are really fun for me since my first high school job was working in an independent bookstore. These people are true founders and entrepreneurs just like any venture backed company.

Hunter Walk: Can you share the founding story of ArtJamz? How did it all begin?

Michael Clements: The ah-ah moment came when I was up late one night painting, drinking and hanging out with a group of friends at my house instead of going out and thought, “Wouldn’t this be great if there was a place we could go to do this?” During this same time, I had decided to audit an MBA Entrepreneurship class at my alma mater American University in order to learn more about business plans and starting a business. As media / communications professional my business chops were lacking.

During this time, I was working as executive editor of a well-known city magazine where I was interviewing and getting inspired by local business leaders and I had great grasp on the zeitgeist of the city. I also wanted to find an idea that was within the creative economy as I have a passion for and experience within arts and entertainment. Most importantly, since day one, I’ve told myself no matter what I do it has to “make the world a more creative place.” That’s my overriding principle. All these factors, plus timing, blended together to birth ArtJamz.

HW: All of the social platforms claim to help small businesses and brands amplify their voice, find their customers. Are you active on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, etc? How do you decide which products to dedicate time and attention? Do “likes” and “shares” turn into sales?

MC: We are activate on all of these. We have a marketing coordinator who helps get our voice heard as well as listens to and communicates with voices talking about and to us. We further leverage mailchimp (eblasts), wordpress (website), hootesuite (social media messaging), review sites such as Yelp! and Trip Advisor and we have a presence on YouTube. SEO is crucial as well. We use a service called Scene Squid to get our classes and events listed on local media event calendars.

Out of all of them, our team likes Instagram the best since ArtJamz is such a visual experience. We coach our team on capturing great moments in the studio and hash-tagging for maximum effect. We boost posts occasionally on Facebook. We’re convinced all amazing images coming from the studio generate customers and impact to bottom line. We also believe in old school marketing — fliers, posters, street teaming and outreach to editors and media gatekeepers. My team keeps bugging me to up our SnapChat game.

HW: At Homebrew we see lots of startups wanting to serve the small/growing business segment with software tools ranging from ecommerce, to point of sale to employees backoffice and so on. What software tools help power your business – besides Microsoft Excel – since everyone secretly just uses Excel 🙂

MC: Oh wow. So many tools. I think the exciting thing about being a small business in today’s world is that so many of the brilliant minds in technology are building tools to help businesses like ours. It’s amazing but can be overwhelming too. I always joke that were a digital wolf in an analog sheep’s clothing. You can’t get any more analog than putting paint and glitter to canvas and getting your hands dirty. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Everything else is tech.

Aside from the before-mentioned digital marketing tools, we use FareHarbor (online booking and reservations), Square (POS & Gift Cards), When I Work (HR, Staff scheduling), Quick Books Online (accounting), Wells Fargo (Banking and Payroll), DropCam (security), Succuri (website security), Slack (team communication), Google Drive (email hosting and file sharing), HubSpot + SideKick (CRM and Email Analytics), and Drop Box. Everything in our studio runs off iPads. We’ve tried several loyalty programs, but haven’t found anything that really works well. As virtual reality becomes more pervasive we’d love to use it to help people paint more!

HW: What’s a problem you wish a technology startup could solve for you?

MC: How about helping my 2 year-old son sleep more, so I can too! Our holy grail is one solution that allows us to follow our customers seamlessly from booking to in-studio experience to post event follow-up. We blazed our own trial in building ArtJamz. The result is that ArtJamz is a hybrid experience — somewhere between restaurant, paint and sip and gym / yoga studio. So, the right reservation + POS software solutions have been hard to find. To complicate that, we’re building multiple locations, so the system needs to be able to scale across numerous locations, whether franchises or corporate-owned locations.

We need one system that allows customers to choose their favorite ArtJamz studio, book and pay online for an experience, quickly check in and make additional transactions in the studio, and then enables us to follow up with a loyalty program, offers, surveys, etc. It would be great if it handled staff scheduling and offered monthly memberships and tracking of blocks of studio time like a yoga studio. I’ve recently spent more time researching gym / yoga studio solutions.

HW: You partnered with Bond Street for growth capital. How did you originally connect with Bond Street? What’s the biggest difference for you between a platform like Bond Street and traditional borrowing from a bank or other offline source?

MC: I had been researching funding options for about 2 years in order to build-out our 4th location and make it our prototype retail location. We’ve bootstrapped since we launching. This enabled us to open a number of studios and remain profitable, but, we never had enough liquidity to go all in and create our “model location.” In tech terms, our first 3 locations were phase 1, 2 & 3 MVPs. First, we tried investors. But, based on our sales and the amount we we’re looking to raise, $60-$120K, it could have meant giving up over 40% equity. Why give up that much equity for an amount we could raise other ways?

Then we tried traditional lending. We were approved for an SBA loan but after 4 to 5 months of going through the SBA closing process, I had a change of heart, mainly since this meant using my mine and my wife’s house as collateral. As a new dad and husband, the more I thought about that, the more it bothered me. You can’t really beat a 10 year pay-off at 4% but what’s value of going to be knowing that you haven’t mortgaged your house? It meant eating most of our $5,000 deposit but I’m convinced we made the right choice. Sometimes it’s not all about APR. We looked at credit cards and smaller bank loans, but interest rates of 11 to 15% were too high.

Crowdfunding was an option but brought with it a lot of administrative follow-up and complications. So, we looked at newer forms of lending of which there are many now. Bond street stuck out for several reasons. First, they took the time to understand our business; it wasn’t about crunching us into a pre-set formula like banks do. I was also impressed with the ease of applying. They have a solid tech game. The rates were competitive and the payoff period gave us an extra year over most other lenders. Importantly, they weren’t hard sellers. I probably got quotes and information from 4 or 5 other lenders and in most cases that came with a very aggressive boiler room type hard sell. I also have a lot respect for the fellow DC-based entrepreneurs and the founders of Sweetgreen who were part of Bond Street’s Series A.

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About Bond Street:

Bond Street is transforming small business lending through technology, data and design.

Whether you’re looking to hire additional employees, open a new space, or purchase new equipment or inventory, Bond Street aims to make financing your business goals simple, transparent, and fair.
To learn more about Bond Street, visit https://bondstreet.com/howitworks

“We reinvest all free cashflows back into the business:” SMB Tech Talk from Blank Label

This week I’ll be running a series of Five Question interviews with small businesses which were facilitated by BondStreet, a SMB lending platform (we’re investors). LocalBiz stories are really fun for me since my first high school job was working in an independent bookstore. These people are true founders and entrepreneurs just like any venture backed company.

Hunter Walk: Can you share the founding story of Blank Label? How did it all begin?

Blank Label: It all started because someone complimented me on what I was wearing at work. The summer previous to starting Blank Label, I was in Shanghai and got some custom suits and shirts made. When I came back into the office, people would start complimenting me on my new clothes. It felt awesome, so much so that I was only wearing my custom clothes. Eventually coworkers would ask where these new suits and shirts were from, and when I told them they were custom and affordable, they asked how they could access this. That’s really where it all started, and over the years we’ve just kept finding men who wanted that original premise, clothes that fit and are comfortable at an affordable price.

HW: All of the social platforms claim to help small businesses and brands amplify their voice, find their customers. Are you active on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, etc? How do you decide which products to dedicate time and attention? Do “likes” and “shares” turn into sales?

BL: We are intentionally unsocial. We design our business heavily around our target customer, and he just isn’t looking to engage with brands on social. It’s actually been hard to be disciplined not to jump on the social bandwagon over the years as it’s just become so sexy, but each time we think about investing more there, we just look at our customers’ behavior and recognize there are other areas we can invest.

HW: At Homebrew we see lots of startups wanting to serve the small/growing business segment with software tools ranging from ecommerce, to point of sale to employees backoffice and so on. What software tools help power your business – besides Microsoft Excel – since everyone secretly just uses Excel 🙂

BL: We love excel as much as the next person and everyone in the company lives in either Excel or Google Spreadsheets everyday. In terms of our technology stack, we’ve been pretty in-house focused from day one. We’ve built our website, CRM, ERP all internally, which is pretty uncommon for a company our size with one developer. Email is our most powerful marketing channel, and for that we use an ESP called Klaviyo, and SumoMe for on-site email capture. Two other software products of not that we’ve been really happy with are Gusto for payroll, HelpScout for support desk.

HW: What’s a problem you wish a technology startup could solve for you?

BL: From a marketing standpoint, we take more of a brand approach than direct approach. That makes attribution challenging, e.g. a visitor finds a blog post via organic search, then comes back via retargeting ad, and then finally converts on direct traffic. Do we know all those touch points for that visitor, and how do we weight those sources of traffic. There are some enterprise solutions that we’ve seen, but nothing that’s been a right fit for a company our size.

HW: You partnered with Bond Street for growth capital. How did you originally connect with Bond Street? What’s the biggest difference for you between a platform like Bond Street and traditional borrowing from a bank or other offline source?

BL: We heard about Bond Street from a business network called YEC. For a company like ours, we reinvest all free cashflows back into the business, but on a tax return basis (which is what traditional bank lenders look at), it looks like we’re barely profitable. From Bond Street, they’re willing to dig into the numbers a bit more and see that we are reinvesting back, and are growing at a good clip that we can comfortably cover the debt. It was also a frictionless process where we uploaded docs we already had and very quickly got a loan offer.

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About Bond Street:

Bond Street is transforming small business lending through technology, data and design.

Whether you’re looking to hire additional employees, open a new space, or purchase new equipment or inventory, Bond Street aims to make financing your business goals simple, transparent, and fair.
To learn more about Bond Street, visit https://bondstreet.com/howitworks

“I don’t ever plan on retiring:” SMB Tech Talk from Tone Academy

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This week I’ll be running a series of Five Question interviews with small businesses which were facilitated by BondStreet, a SMB lending platform (we’re investors). LocalBiz stories are really fun for me since my first high school job was working in an independent bookstore. These people are true founders and entrepreneurs just like any venture backed company.

Hunter Walk: Can you share the founding story of Tone Academy of Music. How did it all begin?

Jenny Shaw: The question on how something begins is a bit slippery – especially when it comes to education and the field of teaching.  Technically, I opened Tone in June of 2011.  However, the dream has always been to have my own school – even back when I started playing in Suzuki at 2 years old. My journey through music with my mom was a source of strength and cooperation that I wanted to extend to other families and although I had a performing career throughout my college and 20’s, teaching was always my passion and my calling.  After teaching in NYC at SO many different schools, I realized that in 2011 I had enough of a reputation and following that it would make more sense to start a community of parents and teachers who could share in my vision.  We started with 40 kids and 3 teachers and now we have over 300 students and 25 teachers. I don’t ever plan on retiring from this community!

HW: All of the social platforms claim to help small businesses and brands amplify their voice, find their customers. Are you active on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, etc? How do you decide which products to dedicate time and attention? Do “likes” and “shares” turn into sales?

JS: Yes, we have an online presence that we actively (to different levels) participate in using a variety of platforms.  Like many businesses, it’s hard to translate “likes” to sales, but especially so in our business which is so very personal and also has to do with childhood education.  There is NOTHING more important than a direct referral from an existing client.  I’m dubious about how much “personal referrals” happen in social media, but it could quite possibly start the conversation on the playground.  When I look at our metrics (to the extent we can gather information) our #1 point of contact is still face to face referrals and our #2 is our sidewalk sign.  That floors and frustrates me to think that a very basic sign can drive traffic more than the thousands we spend on online marketing, but I think because we’re in NYC, location is also a huge factor for parents.  I can’t discount the fact that all of the tangled web of online algorithms are calculated by having a well-rounded online and social media identity…  By that I mean Instagram may not bring a client in, but having that link may up our Google rating which in turn may bring someone in.

HW: At Homebrew we see lots of startups wanting to serve the small/growing business segment with software tools ranging from ecommerce, to point of sale to employees backoffice and so on. What software tools help power your business – besides Microsoft Excel – since everyone secretly just uses Excel 🙂

JS: This question automatically raises my anxiety level.  I feel when I’m asked this question, what I’m telling myself is “You are not using enough programs!  You should be investigating this more!”  However, in the past when I’ve tried to utilize a new program – scheduling software for example – I’ve sunk so much time and cost into training and populating our data only to find out that it really doesn’t work for us or is buggy and more of a hassle!  I am pulled in so many directions, I find that I keep wanting to try and automate more things, but can’t invest the time in finding the “best” solutions… so I don’t eventually make time to change.  To answer the question though, I use Quickbooks online, Paypal, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Paperless Post, and Survey Monkey with enough ease to get the job done.  Oh, and SquareSpace.

HW: What’s a problem you wish a technology startup could solve for you?

JS: See above!  I would like for someone to take a look at our business and our needs, and tell ME what is out there that is worth me paying time and money for.  Also, I’m always afraid that there is something that I’m leaving myself open to risk… that I just don’t know to cover myself for.  I have insurance for example, but I really don’t know what our liability would be if I wanted to take kids off the property for a performance in the community.

HW: You partnered with Bond Street for growth capital. How did you originally connect with Bond Street? What’s the biggest difference for you between a platform like Bond Street and traditional borrowing from a bank or other offline source?

JS: They found ME!  I literally said “this is too good to be true.”  I was in a panic trying to apply for a loan through a bank (SBA as part of it) but it was so over my head and I had invested so much time just to not even be considered.  The main difference is that a PERSON talked to me about what they saw in my financials (which they had me just link to instead of putting together for them) and they said, oh of course we get why you need money… makes sense.  On top of that, they really do care about my business and I feel so supported by them.  I’m actually excited when they call and email me.  Who knew!

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About Bond Street:

Bond Street is transforming small business lending through technology, data and design.

Whether you’re looking to hire additional employees, open a new space, or purchase new equipment or inventory, Bond Street aims to make financing your business goals simple, transparent, and fair.
To learn more about Bond Street, visit https://bondstreet.com/howitworks

A Socially-responsible, Triple-bottom line Taco Shop: SMB Tech Talk from Chaia

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This week I’ll be running a series of Five Question interviews with small businesses which were facilitated by BondStreet, a SMB lending platform (we’re investors). LocalBiz stories are really fun for me since my first high school job was working in an independent bookstore. These people are true founders and entrepreneurs just like any venture backed company.

Hunter Walk: Can you share the founding story of Chaia? How did it all begin?

Bettina Stern: My business partner Suzanne Simon and I have been cooking together for many years.  Chaia was the result of our matched style toward food and our wish to bring seasonal, vegetable cuisine to DC. Initially we tested our concept at farmers markets in the District to ascertain whether this unique and rather esoteric idea would be well received. It turns out, we were neither too early nor too late, but we were right on time. Plant-based cooking and eating more vegetables was a message that even policy makers, Michael Pollan and First Lady Michelle Obama were pushing on the American public.  Within weeks of showing up at market for the first time in our white 10×10 foot tent, Chaia had been named “one of DC’s top nine tastemakers”.

Our style of cooking focuses on what’s freshest at the farm market and what’s in season.  We believe eating like this is healthiest both for people and for our planet. Real foods have seasons and taste superior when eaten as such. Chaia is slow-cooked, fast casual food that is all about plants. We are not doing this because of a fad. This is about long-term shifts in the way people are eating – and how they will need to eat moving forward to save their bodies and the planet.

HW: All of the social platforms claim to help small businesses and brands amplify their voice, find their customers. Are you active on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, etc? How do you decide which products to dedicate time and attention? Do “likes” and “shares” turn into sales?

BS: We are active on all of the social media channels above, save for Tumblr.  Our SM has definitely helped us to build up a stronger following.  We refer to our tacos as “Insta-bait” because they are beautiful and so is our Georgetown shop.  Intrinsically, our product consists of fresh, colorful, organic material that is perfectly suited to photography. I am not sure that our SM has had any influence on the actual food culture, but it makes for pretty pictures. We’ve also had some very generous artists contributing to our cache of usable imagery and promotional material – for which we are VERY grateful.

Our brick and mortar has only been open since November 2015.  We opened our doors the week before Thanksgiving and then headed into the holiday season and the cold, winter months. In a new neighborhood during what is traditionally the hardest hit months for restaurateurs, we needed to test a myriad of ideas for getting customers into our shop.  Social media played a role in reminding loyal Chaia fans that we had moved to a permanent location and to entice our new neighbors to come in and visit.  However, old-fashioned soliciting was also needed to get folks in to our doors, so we put flyers on cars, posters up at our local universities and slipped notes under doors.  We are currently reaching out to our Georgetown business and corporate owners, design firms, fitness groups and like-minded NGOs.  We are offering promotions and larger-scale catering to continue to scale our business from not just a walk-in, counter service quick serve but to something even more accessible to all of the city’s neighborhoods.  This will help us create a web of loyal customers all over the DMV as we begin to focus on our next locations.

HW: At Homebrew we see lots of startups wanting to serve the small/growing business segment with software tools ranging from ecommerce, to point of sale to employees back-office and so on. What software tools help power your business – besides Microsoft Excel – since everyone secretly just uses Excel 🙂

BS: We are using a number of different software programs to help facilitate and streamline our business. Here are a few:

  • Orderly – a restaurant purchasing app for ordering, invoicing and inventory
  • HotSchedules – a restaurant management platform for scheduling employees, plus more
  • Asana – a project management tool to help our team track our work and current and past projects
  • Revel – our iPad-based point of sale
  • Bento Box – our mobile-friendly website was created by them to help drive revenue and customers
  • UberEats – we recently partnered with this behemoth to get our food to more customers

HW: What’s a problem you wish a technology startup could solve for you?

BS: I would like an effective tool for creating easy-to-use costing tools (i.e: plated recipes, employee hours, fixed fees).  A humanities major, I am not well-versed at Excel or things with numbers. Others on my team are, so we more than get by.  However, I would like idiot-proof ways to watch all our costs in real time – and with little or no math skills!

HW: How have you financed your business to date? What lessons have you learned that you can share with other SMB’s?

BS: As co-founders, Suzanne and I are equal business partners 50/50.  We had an initial valuation made on our existing farmers market business and we secured a small business loan from a local bank to help finance much of our build-out costs. She and I retain the majority of the business, but we brought on strategic investors to help finance our business and to help us grow our company to expansion.

I’ve been asked if our investors balked at the idea of a socially-responsible, triple-bottom line taco shop? Quite the opposite, it actually made several PE advisors more excited about our venture, as they realized the model is attractive to today’s consumers.

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About Bond Street:

Bond Street is transforming small business lending through technology, data and design.

Whether you’re looking to hire additional employees, open a new space, or purchase new equipment or inventory, Bond Street aims to make financing your business goals simple, transparent, and fair.
To learn more about Bond Street, visit https://bondstreet.com/howitworks

“We’ve focused on instagram and Facebook and increasingly, snapchat” -> SMB Tech Talk from 305 Fitness

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This week I’ll be running a series of Five Question interviews with small businesses which were facilitated by BondStreet, a SMB lending platform (we’re investors). LocalBiz stories are really fun for me since my first high school job was working in an independent bookstore. These people are true founders and entrepreneurs just like any venture backed company.

Hunter Walk: Can you share the founding story of 305 Fitness? How did it all begin?

Sadie (Founder): 305 Fitness is a dance cardio workout with a live DJ. We have locations in NYC, Boston, and D.C.

My story is:

I started dieting and going to the gym at a very young age, 11 or 12. I was using the treadmill as a way to purge. The conversation is my head was always punitive. Then I discovered dance. It was uplifting and positive. I could get an effective workout and not once look at the clock. So I started teaching dance cardio in college. The classes caught on like crazy and students used to line up around the block to take them. All of my friends could see how passionate I was about these classes, though I never considered teaching fitness professionally. My senior year, I was out at a nightclub in Miami — where I’m from — with my best friend. We looked around at the lights, the DJ, the bumpin sound and we thought: we have to take these classes I’m teaching and add this kind of thrilling environment. So that’s the story of 305: it’s world’s colliding. Fun and fitness fused under one roof.

HW: All of the social platforms claim to help small businesses and brands amplify their voice, find their customers. Are you active on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, etc? How do you decide which products to dedicate time and attention? Do “likes” and “shares” turn into sales?

S: We’re very focused on social media, particularly where we can find our young demographic. most of our clients are in their 20s and 30s, so we’ve focused on instagram and Facebook and increasingly, snapchat. Right now, our instagram is growing considerably every day. For us, it’s not a direct translation of sales. It’s about engaging our community, finding ways to keep 305 Fitness top-of-mind for junkies during the 23 hours that they aren’t taking class. We’ve found community to be huge; not only is an inclusive, positive environment very much part of our mission, but we know that people are much more likely to stay committed to fitness when they have a tribe of others counting on them to show up. Instagram serves that community-building purpose for us.  

HW: At Homebrew we see lots of startups wanting to serve the small/growing business segment with software tools ranging from ecommerce, to point of sale to employees backoffice and so on. What software tools help power your business – besides Microsoft Excel – since everyone secretly just uses Excel 🙂

S:

  • Shiftplanning — we use this to schedule all of our instructors, front desk staff, and DJs across all cities.
  • Mindbody — this is the leading CRM software in the fitness/spa industry.

HW: What’s a problem you wish a technology startup could solve for you?

S: Honestly, I’d love to see someone build a better Mindbody. it’s no shade on them, but they lack a lot of functionality. I really challenge someone to build software that’s as comprehensive and can track my customer data, but can pull more essential reporting, has a more beautiful interface, can more seamlessly integrate onto a website, and makes check-out easier.

HW: You partnered with Bond Street for growth capital. How did you originally connect with Bond Street? What’s the biggest difference for you between a platform like Bond Street and traditional borrowing from a bank or other offline source?

S: I heard about Bond Street through a friend, who went to school with David Haber, the brilliant founder behind it all. I really enjoyed my process with Bond Street. They made it very simple to move forward. I had direct access to the person reviewing my application — unlike the bureaucracy at a big bank. The online application was simple and painless. All in all, it took about 5 hours of time from start of application to signing for the loan. That’s pretty good!

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About Bond Street:

Bond Street is transforming small business lending through technology, data and design.

Whether you’re looking to hire additional employees, open a new space, or purchase new equipment or inventory, Bond Street aims to make financing your business goals simple, transparent, and fair.
To learn more about Bond Street, visit https://bondstreet.com/howitworks

“I Run My Business Out Of My Cell Phone:” How Mobile Is Powering a Fitness SMB

Like many local businesses, the fitness and wellness industry has seen many new tools to manage backoffice/scheduling, demand generation and social media/community building. Our mutual friend Rob Bailey connected me with Jennifer Pattee who, as founder of San Francisco’s Basic Training, is using everything from crowdfunding to Yelp to power her business.

1. Founding Story – how did Basic Training get started? You were in tech before, working at companies like Apple. Most folks wouldn’t want to give up that opportunity.

The short story of my life is I went from college to Americorps to Congress then back to school. Then IDEO, Apple, and many temp jobs and freelancing gigs in between. Then I launched my company, Basic Training. (www.basictrainingsf.com) We just celebrated our six-year anniversary.

The life I have now is a lot like the life I had in college. I didn’t know it at the time, but college offered me a blueprint for perfect health. I lived in the woods, went to the ocean almost every day, rode my bike for transportation and spent just the right amount of time working, studying, running, partying, hanging out with friends.

After college, everything got thrown out of balance. I was completely focused on my career, it really took a toll on my body. Eventually I started running and competing in adventure races, and a lot of people told me I was crazy — I could hurt myself and jeopardize my career. The irony is that I ended up injuring myself at my desk. While it’s true I had a job a lot of people would kill for, the hours in my day when I felt most alive were running on the trails before work with my friends. I realized I couldn’t give up the best years of my life doing something that lost its meaning. So I trusted my gut, listened to my body, and changed careers. Now I lead my clients down the same path.

In starting this company, I looked at everything that was wrong with our physical culture, and asked myself how I could make it different, make it better. I never set out to be an entrepreneur, solving problems is just what designers are trained to do. My  approach to fitness emerged from the answers I found, and my company grew out of that.

These days I’ve come full circle. The work I am most excited about is where I can be a catalyst for change at a macro level. As an SF native, I’ve always wanted to help the city that I love by disrupting the status quo. Today CEOs, neighborhoods, even developers are asking for my help in creating new systems. Companies realize that wellness isn’t just a perk anymore. If they want their employees to change the world, they need to support their physical well being. Communities are learning their health depends on building a local “movement culture.” Even developers are discovering that embedding opportunities for movement into the built environment adds vibrancy, lowers crime, attracts more people, and sells more units. The business case for active design is very compelling because it doesn’t have to cost a lot.

2. How has technology played a role in customer acquisition? Have you ever run deals via Groupon, others? 

Our biggest technology success story was crowdfunding our community pop-up fitness space (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pop-up-fitness-hub-hayes-valley–2) on Indiegogo. People from all over the world rallied to help us take over a parking lot in Hayes Valley and turn it into an outdoor play space. We’re launching it this Saturday June 7. Please come. www.basictrainingparty.eventbrite.com

Other than that, I feel like 90% of our clients find us through their friends. They’ll see changes start to happen in the way their friend looks and operates in the world, and say “Ok, what are you doing? Something’s different. You’ve changed.” Or, “What? You’re running now? You? Since when?” People have also given us a lot of love on Yelp. Thank you everybody for that. http://www.yelp.com/biz/basic-training-san-francisco-2

3. Can you share some of the software tools you use to run your business? Scheduling, payroll, etc? Why did you select these services?

I run my business out of my cell phone, so I’m excited for the next generation of small business tools designed for mobile. What I need most is a product that aggregates all my contacts, emails, and sales pipelines that’s also super simple and elegantly designed. Giving RelateIQ a shot. Other than that, I’m pretty old school when it comes to scheduling and payroll. We end up using paper calendars and carrier pigeons in the studio a lot.

4. Social media seems to be big in the fitness world – both the studios and clients sharing their workouts. How have you approached community building for Basic Training?

Social media has been great, but we don’t share workouts very much. I think part of the fun of our program is you have absolutely no idea what you’re in store for every time you show up.

We mostly use social media to change the way people think about exercise.

You say the word “exercise” and people think “boring, repetitive and hard.”  But in our world, working out is a chance to run and play with your friends, get outside, and see our city in a whole new light. We see things in class that would blow your mind. Dolphins, rainbows, sunrises, sunsets. Not to mention the occasional surfer changing out of their wet suit at Fort Point. We get into every nook and cranny of San Francisco, Marin, and Mt Tam and discover things that cause you to pause and think, yes, I really do live in one of the most incredible places in the world. Instagram and Facebook have been great for sharing all that. I think it helps drive attendance and brand love. We don’t tell people how they should live and what kinds of decisions to make, but we have no problem nudging them to death with inspiring photos until they can’t take it anymore and finally show up for a class.

It’s also fun watching how people respond to us on Facebook. People “like” it when we finish running 100-mile races. But they really love to see those post-race Tecates go down and the occasional debauchery that follows.

5. If a startup was selling a new technology, how do you like to be pitched? How important is word of mouth? Free trial plans? 

I love it when a company has really thought through every step of the user experience when delivering their product to market, and word of mouth is my favorite way of finding out about new things. That’s how I found out about some of my favorite tools, like Strava, Fitstar, and Fitbit. I care less about the way it’s pitched. For me it’s all about considerations like — what problem is this solving? How well is it designed? Is it reliable? How much love and care has this company put into its brand and customer experience?

Warrior Pose! Talking With Glow Yoga’s Founder About the Technology Powering Fitness SMB

Like many local businesses, the fitness and wellness industry has seen many new tools to manage backoffice/scheduling, demand generation and social media/community building. Our mutual friend Rob Bailey connected me with Natasha Ivantsova who, as founder of San Francisco’s Glow Yoga, made the jump from a world of finance modeling to yoga poses.

Q: Founding Story – how did Glow get started? You were working in finance prior, right?
The Glow Yoga & Wellness has started as a fortune that came out of the misfortune of the economy crisis in 2010. The investment company I worked for has been dissolved and everyone was let go. I realized during the unemployment time that the thing I loved the most was practicing yoga and there my dream was born: how wonderful would be to just do yoga for living and never go back to the office job, thinking each morning which one of those uncomfortable office outfits to put on again. So I sat at my coffee shop for next few months writing Glow Wellness business plan, and for my breaks I was going to every yoga studio in the city for ‘marketing research’ 🙂
Q: How has technology played a role in customer acquisition? Have you ever run deals via Groupon, others?  
When I was thinking of opening Glow Yoga, marketing tech tools as Groupon and Facebook and Twitter were the part of my business plan. You can not really start a company without using the e-mail contact lists and all the wonderful online community that is so easily accessible with minimum costs – the only smart solution for small business start up. I didn’t have a luxury of have 20 thousand local email contacts to shout out : Hey, there is a sparkly new Yoga and Pilates studio opened in North Beach, now use this awesome offer to check it out! I really am grateful for such great and easy to implement marketing tools.
As I was opening GO! Indoor Cycling studio last year, I used Indiegogo to fund it! We run a successful campaign, with home made silly video clip that I put together in, it was a very fun project http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-glow-open-spinning-studio
Last year my friend CEO of DataSift Rob Bailey has introduced me to the crowd-funding industry, I think it was a Kickstarted that he showed me one day. I was absolutely fascinated by these new social funding industry, and now I really don’t remember which idea was first – to use Indiegogo for ANYTHING or to open a premier spinning studio. Just kidding!
Q: Can you share some of the software tools you use to run your business? Scheduling, payroll, etc? Why did you select these services?
I am using Mindbody Online for our scheduling, payroll management, all business reports, transaction processing and contact management. I chose this Mindbody because they were showing amazing growth since they started, taking all yoga studios and fitness centers on board by storm offering simple management tools and database, a complete information system for small businesses that is actually affordable.  They provide useful mobile app too where people throughout US can locate yoga, spin, pilates and other sports providers.  I also love Wix – website design and management, I think its a company that actually started in Israel, but what a heck, the guys are doing great job keeping it clean and simple!
Q: Social media seems to be big in the fitness world – both the studios and clients sharing their workouts. How have you approached community building for Glow?
For my marketing needs I use all the available social media companies as Facebook, Twitter, Instragram, Foursquare and Constant Contact for marketing campaigns. Its a invaluable tool to get clients involved and keep them updated with the latest and greatest services and products. People LOVE seeing their pictures doing healthy activities, one of the best things to brag about right? 🙂
Q: If a startup was selling a new technology, how do you like to be pitched? How important is word of mouth? Free trial plans? 
You can not go wrong with a free trial plan, I prefer being approached personally, with a phone call and well done Prezi if its a brand new service that is over $100/monthly priced. Don’t bother with mass email – work of mouth is great if you can get it.  I believe that as a new technology provider, you’ve got to make sure the trial is limited to 1 week/month and you are not acquiring millions of customers that are on a free basis, who have no concept of the service’s value and then have trouble figuring out how to monetize your great idea.
hunter’s note: SMB SaaS & other retail tools are a focus of our Homebrew seed venture fund

Raven + Lily: Empowering Women Through Design

“Empowering women through design” is core value Raven + Lily uses to guide their business. I was introduced to R+L and their Ops Director Cameron Crake via our mutual friend Katy Roth down in Austin, TX. Their mission resonated with me so asked a few questions about how technology and social media have helped them grow. Here are Cameron’s thoughts:
Q: Tell us the story behind Raven + Lily, and how you got involved?
Raven + Lily is a socially conscious lifestyle brand dedicated to empowering women through design. We work with groups of at-risk women around the world to make our collections of apparel, jewelry, and accessories. The women we work with come from various at-risk backgrounds- some are HIV+, some formerly trafficked, some from extreme poverty. Our company started several years ago when our founders, Kirsten Dickerson and Sophia Lin, noticed that non-profits were training these women in design skills. They were learning to sew and make jewelry, but they lacked market access and design input. So Raven + Lily was born.
I joined the team a couple months after R+L became a company as their first hire. I had just moved back to the US from living in Uganda working with an artisan group, and was thrilled to find a brand here in Austin that so perfectly aligned with the kind of work I wanted to continue doing.
Q: I’m sure lots of technology vendors pitch you about their new products. What’s the most effective way for a startup to sell into a business like yours? What information helps you make a purchase decision?
We are a startup ourselves, so cost of new technology is always a big factor for us. Being able to pay on a month to month basis is always helpful, since staying on budget is so important. Free trial periods are always the best case scenario, so we can make sure the technology is actually a good fit for our business and team. We want to make sure that the expense is going to be worth it before we invest. We like to actually experience how the new technology will save time or money or add value to our business before we put resources into it.
Q: How have you approached social media for R+L?
We want our followers to get a good look at what is happening behind the scenes at our company and feel connected to our brand. We like to give them previews of upcoming products, show them how we are wearing our pieces, and also give them an inside scoop on special deals. We run discounts and contests every few weeks through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Q: If an entrepreneur’s product was going to solve one problem for you, what would it be?
There are a lot of great apps out there that our company utilizes for different purposes…. We have a system for taking wholesale orders at trade shows, a POS system for our new store, an e-commerce platform, and an inventory management system. The problem we keep encountering is that many of them don’t sync. I would love to see some kind of technology that could sync all our systems together. The cost of both time and money to learn and implement a new system can be so consuming. As our business grows and we have needs for new apps, it would be so helpful to have someone develop a way for all these new technologies to communicate to each other and work more effectively for the businesses.

The Godfather of Peanut Butter: How One Sandwich Shop Turned Into a Nutty Empire

I’m a liberal arts guy – not just in spirit but also education, having studied History at Vassar College. During those four years I was introduced to many new ideas, including one by classmate Lee Zalben: peanut butter can solve all problems. Lee put his hypothesis to test in 1998 via Peanut Butter & Co, a small retail shop which has turned into a multiplatform success. One which still goes best with a glass of milk. Here’s a short interview I did with Lee. 

Q: So Peanut Butter & Co started first as a NYC retail shop right? Did you always plan to do ecommerce as well? Tell us a little about its growth.

I opened the Peanut Butter & Co. sandwich shop in 1998, and the menu consisted entirely of peanut butter sandwiches, snacks, and desserts.  Customers started coming in with Tupperware containers, asking to take home some of our peanut butter, so we started putting it in jars for them to take home.  Tourists from out of town who had bought our peanut butter during their visit to NYC started calling us when their jars became empty, and we realized we needed to figure out a way to keep them supplied, so we added e-commerce to our website www.ilovepeanutbutter.com.  That was in 1999 – we were in fact one of the first food companies to offer e-commerce to consumers.  The sandwich shop and e-commerce are a very small part of our business now however – most of our sales come of grocery stores, supermarkets, and specialty and natural food stores.

Q: You’ve really created a community of, well, peanut butter lovers. How have you used social media to unite, inspire and converse with your fans?

While we’ve run ads on television and in magazines in the past, social media is our primary tool for communicating with our customers.  We’ve invested a tremendous amount of resources in developing our social network through a wide variety of channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and most recently YouTube.  Our focus online is to create engaging content that entertains, inspires, and educates our fans and followers.

Q: Do your customers create content around their love of peanut butter or do you need to do all the content creation?

We find that sharing great content creates even greater conversations, and every day we are amazed at the incredible array of recipes, videos, stories, and photos that our fans create on their own and share with us.

Q: The business started in 1998. How has the technology you’ve used changed over the last 15 years? What have been some of the most important improvements?

From a marketing perspective, the creation of social media has been the largest technological change, but the evolution of how people use social media is just as important as its emergence.

From a productivity standpoint, smartphones and mobile email have allowed me to stay connected with my business no matter where I’m at, and Skype and other VOIP services allow me to be totally engaged in every part of the world.  We’ve been experimenting with some cloud-based CRM, Project Management, and Intranet tools, but haven’t really found the right mix of features for us yet.  It’s a fast-changing space and we’d love to find an all-in-one integrated solution.

Q: Looking ahead, what technologies are you most excited about – either instore for retail or online with your retailers, community, etc

Everyone is talking about “big data” these days, and I’m excited about the new kinds of insights it can bring to our marketing efforts.  That said, I’ve yet to see a platform that can deliver valuable, actionable insights at a cost that a small business can afford.  Again, it’s a fast-changing space so I’m hopeful that some of the companies that are in limited free/beta mode will offer deeper insights at reasonable rates in the near future.

peanut butter

From Exit to Cocoa Bean: How The Plaxo Founders Started Dandelion Chocolate

A few years back while walking Valencia St here in SF Caroline and I noticed Dandelion Chocolate, a new factory/store which focuses on bean-to-bar production – that means they take care to manage the whole supply chain. Dandelion’s founders previously started the internet company Plaxo, so I was particularly interested to learn how they were incorporating technology into their business. In founder Todd Masonis’ words:

Q: So, the chocolate business? Tell me the founding story of Dandelion Chocolate.
It all started with a love of chocolate. Prior to Dandelion, my friend, Cameron Ring, and I co-founded an Internet company, Plaxo. We sold the company in 2008 to Comcast and were taking some much-needed time off. We were hanging around the HipChat guys, helping them with their company. They had a vacant garage and for fun, Cam and I started experimenting with roasting cacao. We’ve always loved chocolate and it was a challenge make it from scratch. Before long, we had a small chocolate factory running from the HipChat garage.
It’s really fun to make chocolate — you have to source interesting beans from crazy places, build your own machines, and develop whole new processes. When we shared our chocolate with friends and family, they were surprised by the unique and distinct flavors of each bean. While still in the garage, we started winning awards and getting wholesale orders. That’s when we decided we should do something with this.
We also now know, what we didn’t know then, that it’s a really exciting time for chocolate. What happened to coffee, microbrew, and wine, is all happening to chocolate right now. There’s a new American craft chocolate movement where guys in garages all over the country (and now, world) are roasting up specialty beans. In ten years this shift is going to be painfully obvious, but we just stumbled into things right as they were about to take off.
Q: How did your technology background help shape the way you approached DC?
I think it helped tremendously. For one, having a mindset of keeping things lean — and solving the problems you actually have — let us take things one step at a time. The first step was to make sure we could make an incredible product. In our case, that means single-origin bars made with only two ingredients with each origin tasting unique, distinct, and delicious. Second, we wanted to prove the market, but that’s been straightforward. We’ve always been production-limited: our wholesale customer waitlist currently exceeds our actual customer list and we always run at max capacity. Now it’s just a matter of scaling the hard parts, without compromising flavor. This is a process that takes a very long time, but has allowed for a purity of vision and a simple business model.
The tech background also helps in unexpected ways, like even with roasting. The traditional French chocolate makers will say you need at least 30 years to learn how to roast and make a great chocolate bar. But we knew about A/B testing and optimizing metrics, and search spaces and fitness functions. So we applied a very rigorous methodology that got us to testable, repeatable, great flavor much faster.
On the flipside, one unexpected surprise in the non-tech world was all the permitting and regulations. One permit for our factory took over a year and half — and there was nothing contentious, that’s just the speed of government. If every time you wanted to start a website you had to go to city hall and have a bureaucrat sign a piece of paper, there would be no tech industry.
Q: What technology tools do you use at Dandelion and why? (point of sale, back office, etc)
Things are much better now, but when we started a few years ago, there were very few good tools. We were spoiled by having had dashboards, analytics, and data warehousing at Plaxo, so we ended up building our own dashboards for each part of the business. Over time, we’ve been able to swap out parts of our home-grown solution piece-by-piece with better tools. So we’re sort of just left with high-level dashboards and glue code to keep it all together.
The great tools we use are: square (POS), stichlabs (order tracking, invoices), shipstation (shipping), wordpress (blog and basic auth), xero (accounting), intuit online payroll, freshdesk (customer support). All the tools play nicely together, so every transaction/action is seamless. And we have high-level dashboards anyone at the company can look at, e.g. in the kitchen we have an iPad where the pastry team tracks every brownie and cookie sold.
Q: There are many startups who want to serve the local retail market – any advice to founders in that space?
I think there’s still a ton of opportunity here. We were forced to build our own tools, but are very happy with other companies filling this void. Most of the magic comes from the glue code though — when every tool interoperates, it makes for a clean experience. For instance, when someone orders online, it goes straight into our accounting software and a shipping label pops out of the shipping printer. The demand dashboard updates and the fulfillment team gets a notification. Each application is being attacked in it’s own niche way (which is great), but most small companies don’t have the knowhow to glue everything together, so I think that’s one place that is currently underserved.
hunter’s note: SMB SaaS & other retail tools are a focus of our Homebrew seed venture fund